Wii Remotes: the new hot commmodity

Posted October 26, 2010 - 05:04
by
Mike Luttrell

Wii sales have started to taper off, but that's not stopping Nintendo from boasting about other sales numbers...

Nintendo sent out a press release today gloating over the extremely high level of Wii Remote sales it's seen since the Wii first went on sale in 2006. With only around 30.4 million Wii units actually sold at retail, gamers are buying an average of more than two controllers for every console. That's a ratio that most systems never attain.

Nintendo had its own number crunchers come up with a fun statistic about the number of Wii Remotes that were sold: "That’s enough for every man, woman and child living in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit and San Francisco, and enough still remains for every resident of Florida, Ohio, Virginia and North Dakota," it said in the press release.

Of course, for over a year we saw the game Wii Play top the video game sales charts. It wasn't a stellar game by any stretch, but it included a Wii Remote, a move some saw as a cheesy way to inflate Nintendo's game sales numbers. And now we know exactly how big of a factor that was. Of the 34.85 million Wii Remotes that were sold, 12.92 million of them came from Wii Play. That's more than a third. In other words, it was a genius move by Nintendo.

However, even though it wasn't packed in with any huge games, the Nunchuk controller attachment has sold very well too. More than 52.9 million Nunchuks have flown off store shelves (including the 30.41 million that were included in Wii console sales). We don't have any statistics on Wii-related injuries, but it is true that there are 65 million blunt-force weapons being flung around homes at every waking hour. Yep, we turned this into a fear mongering story. Hell yeah.

The impressive-sounding numbers were also a way for Nintendo to kick off its Wii Remote Plus campaign. The new version of the Wii controller, which was Wii Motion Plus built directly into it, will be available starting November 7 for around $40.